"It has, I tell you. There's something wrong in our blood, I suppose. Look at your brother." "Poor Julian!" sighed the girl. "Poor Julian!" cried the woman scornfully. "Of course he is poor, and he deserves it. He must have been mad." "But he loved her, mamma, so dearly." "Loved!" cried the woman with a wild intensity of rage in her deep rich voice and gesture, as she spat on the floor. "Curse love! Curse it! What has it done for me? A few sickly embraces--a few years of what the world calls happiness--and then a widowhood of poverty and misery." "Mamma, you will kill me if you talk like that." "Then I will talk like that, and save myself from temptation more than I can bear," cried the woman fiercely. "What has love done for the son of whom I was so proud--my gallant-looking, handsome boy? Why, with his bold, noble, Spanish face and dark eyes, he might have wed some heiress, married whom he liked--and what does he do? turns himself into a galley slave." "Mamma, what are you saying?" cried the girl faintly. "The truth. What has he done? Married a woman without a _sou_, and had to accept that post at the mines. Isn't that being a galley slave?" "But he loved Delia, mamma." "Loved her! Curse love! I tell you. The ass! The idiot, to be led away by that sickly, washed-out creature--the Honourable Delia Dymcox," she continued, with an intensity of scorn in her tones. "But she is a lady, mamma." "Lady? The family are paupers, and, forsooth, they must look down on him--on us because we have no blood. Well, she is justly punished, and he too. I hope they like Auvergne." "Oh, mother," sighed the girl weakly, "you are very cruel." "Cruel? I wish I had been cruel enough to have strangled you both at birth. I wish our family were at an end--that it would die out as Julian's brats waste away there in that hot, dry, sun-cursed region." "You do not mean it, dear?" "I do, Mary; I swear I do. Oh that I could have been so weak as to marry as I did--to be cursed with two such children!" "You talk so, dear, because you are angry with me," sighed the girl. "I know you loved poor papa dearly." "Pish! You are like him." "Yes, mamma, and poor Julian has always been so like you." There was silence then in the half-shadowed room, while the mother sat sternly gazing out at the stream that rippled by the cottage, dancing in the sunlight and bathing the roots of the willows that kissed its dimpling, silvery surface. The verdant meadows stretched far away rich in the lush grass and many flowers that dotted them with touches of light. All without looked bright and joyous, as a lark high poised poured forth his lay, which seemed to vibrate in the blue arch of heaven, and then fall in silvery fragments slowly down to earth.